Buffalo to Obama: ‘I need a freakin job’

Tools

Two Buffalo NY businessmen forced to close their small manufacturing company a year and a half ago have managed to cut through the media clutter like Joe the Plumber and focus on the major economic problem facing many Americans today:

“Dear Mr. President, I need a freakin job. Period,” says the billboard sponsored by the INAFJ Project, which will coincide with President Obama’s trip to the Rust Belt city on his “Main Street Economic Tour” Thursday.

INAFJ was organized by Jeff Baker, who characterized the layoffs of 25 employees from Adirondacks Blanket Works ,which he owned with his brother Scott, as “the most heartbreaking situation in my life.”

“The banks just refused to work with us,” Baker told the Buffalo News. The Bakers spent $5,500 to rent the billboard space a month ago, not knowing then that the president would be coming to town.

“See here’s the thing, Nothing matters if people and families aren’t working,” the website says. It then goes on to describe:

“Stupid” as “believing the problems we have can be solved by the same people that created them”…

“Crazy” as “saying you’re going to create jobs by spending unimaginable amounts of money that you borrow from the very same people (China) that you give all the jobs to”…

and “Sick” as the “billions of tax dollars spent on bailing out the financial institutions [whose] own immeasurable greed was responsible for the collapse of America’s future.”

Household income in the Buffalo/ Niagara region had already fallen 4 percent between 2000 to 2008 – before the economic collapse. Unemployment there is now 8.6 percent, or slightly less than the national average of 9.7 percent.